Sunday, July 19, 2009

Extending the idea of tossing a coin to the throw of a pair of dice. The throw doesn't have equal probable events , ie: Probability of getting a cumulative sum of 10 is not the same of getting a cumulative sum of 7.

The probabilities of rolling a cumulative sum of 'n' is maximum for rolling a 7 (16.67% , lucky seven) while it is the lowest for rolling a 2 or 12 (2.78%).

To allow the user to have the 12 choices (2-12 and Quit) two variables are used as posx and posy (single variable pos used in the toss of a coin), to make a grid.

Fig1. The start up screen

Fig2. The user interface

Fig3. The Result screen (1)

Fig 4. The Result screen (2)

The coding gets lengthy due to the 36 possible outcomes of the event. The lines of codes tally to nearly 1450 across 2 python files.

It is worth noting that throw of a single die is an equal-probable event with all events bearing a 16.67% probability thus programming such an interface would be lot easier and just matter to add on to the toss of a coin code.

Saturday, July 18, 2009

Something very conspicuous about software and programming languages are that they are named in rather peculiar manner. Sometimes it is a play of words as WINE (Wine Is Not an Emulator) and XNA (XNA is Not Acronymed) to those named after some scientist or mathematician as Ada, Turing, Pascal etc , then there are also those named after some entertainment/cartoon character as Linda (allegedly named after porn star Linda Lovelace) , Python (named after the comedy group Monty Python) and Django (named after jazz guitarist Django Reinhart).

Fig1. The British comedy group Monty PYTHON

Fig2. Jazz Guitarist DJANGO Reinhardt

DJANGO 1.0

An open source web development tool , developed in 2005 for maintaining news websites for The World Company , Lawrence , Kansas.

Versions 1.0 and higher , released in early 2009 has been lot different than the previous version of 0.96.

Just to check everything is in order ..... check the django version and django-admin must be on the path !